This Memo on the Margin first appeared on April 14, 1997, the day after Tiger
won the 1997 Masters. It was no fluke, and today his won his fourth Masters,
the ninth major championship since 1997. Here's what I had to say when he won
his first:

Tiger Woods and an End to Racism

Fifty years ago in late April, ten-year-old Jude walked to Ebbets
Field with his 9-year-old brother Terry to watch the first Saturday game the
Brooklyn Dodgers played with Jackie Robinson in the lineup. I'm sure I didn't
think much about the history that was being made at the time. I seemed to
recall thinking that it would be an advantage to the Dodgers to be the only
team letting a Negro play on the team. My Uncle Jack, my father's older
brother, who owned his own coal truck in Minersville, Pa., was visiting that
week, and I vividly recall him making fun of Jackie Robinson, telling me he
wouldn't make it, that "niggers were only good for a pick and a
shovel." I was shocked at his words and have never forgotten the
circumstance in which he uttered them.

In winning the Master's yesterday in his first attempt as a professional,
Tiger Woods took us a step closer to ending the racist idea as it has existed
throughout the history of civilization. This is not because a black man was
never supposed to win so persuasively at the most intellectual of all athletic
endeavors -- the game of golf -- but because of the way Tiger learned the
game. Even fifty years ago, my Uncle Jack would needle me about Jackie
Robinson playing baseball, but he wouldn't say a word about the fact that
black men did play professional football. White men have for centuries
accepted the idea that black men could be champions in physical activities
that did not involve much intellectual brainpower. They could box and wrestle,
run and jump, block and tackle. But baseball involved subtle intellectual
calculations connected to the physical actions involved. Keeping pro baseball
closed to blacks was not only a social distinction, it also was part of the
prevailing conventional wisdom that blacks were intellectually unsuited for
this kind of activity. Racism has always involved a genetic distinction among
classes of people, even before science developed the concept of genetics.
Adolf Hitler's idea of a master race was built around a eugenic combination of
physical and intellectual racial attributes.

Men have always believed some classes of men have been intrinsically superior
to others. Even those who have been told they are inferior have frequently
accepted their fate. Tiger Woods comes as close as any human being in all of
history to ending racism in that sense. The credit really goes not to Tiger,
but to his father, Earl Woods, who taught Tiger the game when he was literally
a baby. Earl was a club pro and there have been many club pros who taught
their kids the game at an early age. But Earl went further. He set up a
practice range in his garage, and as soon as Tiger was able to sit in a high
chair, he sat him there to watch Daddy swing. By the time Tiger was eight
months old, he could sit and watch for two hours without complaint. When he
was nine months, old enough to stand, Earl let him take a whack, and insists
that Tiger's swing was a replica of his own. The picture of the swing had
burned itself into Tiger's infant brain.

This is important far beyond the sports pages. It tells us that Tiger didn't
show up as a genetic "sport," a statistical "out-lyer"
that we should consider as being a freak of nature, a million-to-one shot. It
tells us there is something to the argument that the human brain, at the
moment life begins, is not stuck with a preordained potential that is related
to race, in particular to skin pigmentation. It was only a few years ago that
my Uncle Jack believed a black man was only good for a pick and a shovel.
Jackie Robinson was bound to fail at baseball, a game high on the intellectual
scale. The only athletic endeavors higher on the intellectual scale were
limited to the football quarterback and the professional golfer. The way Tiger
learned the game of golf from his high chair is not something widely known,
but it will be. It will lead to revolutions in the way we think about all
children, black, brown and white, and their potential if only they can develop
from their earliest days within a family that is committed to the potential of
their children.